


back to the future

by irene_addling



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: (the answer is yes. Nick absolutely does.), Angst, F/M, POV Alternating, Post-Railroad Ending, commonwealth politics, do androids dream of electric redheads?, equal parts sad robot UST and the author's fascination with post-apocalyptic militia organization
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23032039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irene_addling/pseuds/irene_addling
Summary: Six months after the fall of the Institute, Minutemen General Molly Levine discovers that Father left one last surprise.
Relationships: Female Sole Survivor/Nick Valentine
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	back to the future

**Author's Note:**

> Post-Railroad ending, y'all know the drill.

When Molly tried to kiss him, Nick assumed she’d fell.

Sure, the seas were gentle, but it was also pitch-black: the ride back from Far Harbor took almost twelve hours, so it was almost always a trip they made overnight. Plus, Molly was drunk. “One for the road” at the Last Plank had turned into three, as more and more people had toasted the Mariner’s memory, and she’d emptied her caps purse and brought a round for the entire bar by the end of the night. Honestly, Nick was relieved to see Molly let loose a little: leading the fast-growing Minutemen alone had been running her ragged, and ever since she’d divided them into East and West factions and had two colonels under her manage the day-to-day, you could almost see the weight off her shoulders. She could just focus on her Railroad missions now, and it seemed to make her lighter. Happier. More carefree.

But no one was ever carefree enough to think Nick Valentine was human.

“Easy, doll,” he muttered, catching her and grabbing on as the boat rocked, her lips smashing into his collarbone instead. “You’ve had a few too many.”

“An’ you’re a few too _much,_ ” Molly slurred, “so lemme _kiss_ you, you big bolt.”

Nick was suddenly hyperaware of his arm around her lanky shoulders, his hand in what was left of her short red hair - shorn into an undercut three days after she’d blown up the Institute - all too intimate to deny what she’d just tried to do.

“Molly,” he started, “you’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I _know_ what I’m doing,” she snapped back, pushing herself away. The disappointment on her face was almost a pout, which shouldn’t make Nick feel like smiling, but Molly had always made him feel the worst things at the wrong times. “I’ve been wanting to do it sober for a lil’ bit. A lot bit.”

Nick was hyperaware of the creaking of his finger joints as they involuntarily twitched. “Really.”

“Mm-hm. Vodka just gives me…wha’s the word.”

“Delusions?”

“ _No._ There’s an i in it.” Molly bit her lip and studied the ceiling, like there might be a vocabulary list scratched into the paint.

Nick sighed. He’d had a terrible feeling they might have this conversation eventually. But that didn’t mean he actually ever wanted to have it, and he especially didn’t want to have it right now.

“Molly,” he started, about to call her _sweetheart_ before he stopped himself. “…Molly. Listen. This can’t happen.”

It took a second for Molly to register, but when she snapped her fingers and pointed at him like she’d just solved a case, Nick knew she hadn’t really gotten it. “Oh! Cause I’m drunk.”

“No, Molly.”

“I _am_ drunk! But I’ll be _sober._ Soon. _Tomorrow._ ”

“And it’s not happening tomorrow either, doll.” The cartoon pout was changing into genuine disappointment, and if Nick had a heart, it would have broken. He’d told himself, when he’d first run to her after she’d teleported out of the Institute and held her as she sobbed and dry-heaved in the grass, that he’d never let a woman who’d suffered so much get hurt again.

“Nick. Nicky. You…you don’t _mean_ it.” 

Nick pretended to be completely engrossed in digging through his pockets for a cigarette. “I do. There’s someone better for you, doll.”

Molly’s brow furrowed. “Who, Mac?” She giggled quietly. “Him’n Deacon-“

“No, not Mac.”

"Piper’s got Lucy-“

“Molly, I’m not -“

“Caitn’Hancock,” she slurred, ticking people off her fingers, “n’Preston keeps teaching Curie to shoot with like, his whole _body,_ that’s a _move,_ no _way,_ and-“

“Molly,” he muttered gently, because he could never not be gentle with her even when she was checking him off a list of nearly a dozen more beautiful people, “I don’t mean someone we know. I mean someone…”

“Else?”

“Human.”

He hadn’t meant to be so blunt. Or maybe he’d always been wanting to, just to get it over with.

Molly blinked a few times.

“Nick,” she said, soft and gentle, utterly sincere. “I don’t…I don’t, it’s not, I don’t care.”

“You think you don’t,” Nick said, desperate to look away from her eyes - beautiful, bright green, filling with tears - and unable to make himself. “But I’m not human. There are things I can’t do. Things I’m never going to be able to do for you. I can’t…” _Can’t fuck you, can’t give you pleasure, can’t share a meal with you, can’t fall asleep by your side…_ “…I can’t be what a human needs, doll. And it’s better if your heart gets broken now, before you realize I don’t have one.”

The boat was silent, except for the waves. A gull cried out in the distance.

A handful of tears ran down Molly’s face.

“Fuck you, Nick.”

Her voice was the kind of fury that could only be caught on the edge of a sob.

Nick watched her go, stumbling down the boat to sit at the rear. He should let her take the front. He should go comfort her. A better man would’ve.

 _But you’re not a man,_ whispered a sick, low voice in his head that was always loudest when he wanted to punish himself.

Instead, Nick Valentine stood and smoked the rest of his pack of cigarettes until morning, listening as the muffled sobs of the woman he loved fade into sleep.

. . . . . . . . . .

The walk back from the Nakano’s felt like the longest of Molly’s life.

She was incredibly hungover, a headache for the ages pounding behind her temples, by far the drunkest she’d been since before the War with a body that noticed the gap. But somehow that was the least of her problems. Traveling with Nick was often silent - you couldn’t afford to chat when walking the Commonwealth, in case something took advantage of your distraction and got the jump on you - but it was never awkward, not like this. Nick clutched his .44, she held on tight to her shotgun, and they both did their best to pretend they were studiously scanning the beach near Mahkra for ferals. When Nick shot a bullet into one’s head with unnecessary precision, Molly forced herself to look away from the way his fingers twitched on the trigger.

It was a bullet fired from Kellogg’s pistol, but neither of them called it that anymore. Molly had spent nearly a week modding and polishing it, then given it to Nick late Christmas evening as the party in Sanctuary wound down. She’d told herself that it wasn’t any different than giving MacCready that new .50 caliber sniper, or Cait that pink rocket bat, or even Piper the reporter’s notebook from the basement of Jamaica Plain. But as he’d carefully unwrapped the pistol from the pages of a spare Grognak, they’d both known it meant something far more than that. Until today, this gun in particular had been tucked in a footlocker in her and Nate’s old bedroom, ever since she’d pulled it off his killer’s corpse.

(“Don’t,” she’d said, cutting him off before the shocked look in his eyes could turn into a refusal. “I want someone good to use it.”

 _Plus,_ she’d thought as he turned the barrel over in his hands, _it can protect you, and I can’t sleep unless you’re safe._ )

And now she’d blown it, maybe for good, because she’d been foolish and reckless and drunk. She hadn’t felt this powerless since she’d left the Vault.

They just had to get to Coastal, and then they could stop for water and - well. She’d do something. She hated the idea of sending Nick away, but he could go with the mail carrier to Kingsport, and there was a caravan between there and Bunker Hill almost every other day. He’d be safe - she’d insisted on giving him Minutemen travel papers, and that meant that any nearby patrols had to let him walk with them. He’d get to Diamond City, and she’d get to Sanctuary, and then she could drown her sorrows at the High Bar and do something just stupid enough to forget her own feelings, like going head-to-head with Deacon at poker. And then she’d wake up with a hangover and have to tell Shaun that Uncle Nick might never come back and christ, she hadn’t panicked like this since she’d first teleported out of the Institute, and even then Nick had been there to catch her and pat her back and -

They both saw the flare at the same time. Red, two in a row, coming from Coastal Cottage. _Emergency._

Her and Nick looked at each other for a half-second before sprinting up the hill.

“ARCHIE!” she wheezed, clutching the stitch in her side when she reached the top. “What’s going on?”

The old ghoul looked sheepish. The oldest of the five or so settlers who had moved into old boxcars at Coastal, Archie claimed that he’d left Goodneighbor to find enough peace and quiet to write his Great Wasteland Novel, but it turned out that even after the apocalypse, writing mostly involved talking about writing and staring at your typewriter. (Which was a shame, because considering how little pre-War literature had actually survived, Molly was sure whatever he ended up writing would sell like hotcakes.)

He wasn’t who you sent when there was a combat emergency. And now that she’d straightened up and caught her breath, Molly realized that the place looked…peaceful. Other than the settlers peering curiously at her from the gourd patch, nothing seemed out of place. No Gunners, no raiders, no Mirelurk queen.

“General,” Archie said, giving her a salute (he was pre-war military and insisted, even after she’d told him to stop). “They’ve been trying to reach you over ham for the past two hours.”

“Reach me from where?”

“Sanctuary.”

Molly’s blood ran cold.

“Your son is fine.” Archie cut in immediately. “But they want you to go talk to them.”

Molly huffed in relief and re-holstered her shotgun. “Okay. Nick, if it’s Piper, you might want to take her back to Diamond -“

“Alone,” Archie cut in.

“Sorry?”

“They, um. The Sanctuary people on the radio." Molly had never seen him look more nervous. "They want you to talk to them alone.”

For the first time since last night, her and Nick looked each other in the eye. His expression was unreadable, but the intensity made her stomach turn.

“Okay.”

She ran her fingers through what was left of her hair as she walked to the barn, if only to hide that her fingers were shaking.

The carefully restored ham radio was a luxury. Only five had ever been salvaged, and Molly tried to divide them between the important settlements - the Castle, Sunshine Tidings, Sanctuary, the safehouse at Taffington. If Coastal hadn’t been her stopping point to and from Far Harbor, it might’ve been last on the list. But sometimes, like now, it had its uses.

“This is General Molly Levine reporting from Coastal Cottage. Over?”

“BOSS!” MacCready yelled, his voice garbled with static. “Thank fuck, we’ve been trying to reach you for hours-“

Shit, whatever this was had Mac swearing-

“-we’re sending you a bird thing, okay? We’re calling it here and then - DUNCAN! PUT THAT DOWN!”

Shit, whatever this was had Mac swearing _in front of his kid._

She pulled the receiver away from her ear at the brief explosion of static. “Mac, how the hell are you sending me a vertiberd?”

“We found your grenades and we’re going to call one here and get it to go to you - “

“You _went through my signal grenades?_ ” She stored her private weapons in a locked armory cabinet, and the only key was burning a hole in a pocket on her right thigh.

“Cait picked the lock! I’m sorry, boss, we didn’t have any other - "

She pounded the table harder than she expected. “GODDAMNIT, Bobby!”

She only ever called him Bobby if one of them was losing enough blood to start praying.

“Mac. Tell me what’s going on over there, now.”

For a painful second, he went quiet.

“It’s your husband, Molly. It’s Nate. He’s a synth. And he's alive.”

**Author's Note:**

> (For those curious about my stupid postgame worldbuilding: the Minutemen West protect all settlements west of a hypothetical straight line drawn between Jamaica Plain and Covenant, plus the Nuka-World Red Rocket, and the “capitol” is Starlight with Sunshine Tidings serving as troop training grounds. Minutemen East is basically everything else, minus Far Harbor, and their capitol is Spectacle Island with troop training at the Castle. Lots of patrols travel between settlements, and “travel papers” are papers signed by the general that gives whoever holds them permission to walk with any caravan for safety. I have so many headcannons about how all of this works that I promise I won’t bore y’all with, but the division of the Minutemen is something I’m too proud of not to feature.)


End file.
